


Grace in Gravity

by wisdomeagle



Category: Angel: the Series, Firefly
Genre: Community: femslash_minis, F/F, Fairy Tales, POV Second Person, River's feet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-27
Updated: 2008-01-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 19:54:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/613648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wisdomeagle/pseuds/wisdomeagle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every lie's a deeper truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grace in Gravity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [noelia_g](https://archiveofourown.org/users/noelia_g/gifts).



> For noelia_g in femslash_mini's [**Fred Round II**](http://community.livejournal.com/femslash_minis/104432.html). She wanted glass, light, and stories. Title from a song and album by The Story.

Your world, like every story, begins with sacrifice. To keep your heart whole, you grind it to glass, hollow and hopeful, waiting for water pure enough to pour undiluted from lips that shine with spit and not the crushed-berry falsity of make-believe. Then, even waterfalls won't contain your truth. Then, truth will be no fluttering fancy but will be sewn into your own skin with the careful stitches of a seamstress spinner (spinster) who's pricked her finger on other people's truths one too many times and is sleeping, restless, waiting for someone who won't smile back in the made-up storyworld she thinks she inhabits.

You bend at the waist, touch your toes, half a girl. You smile at your faraway feet, slide your fingers between your toes, holding hands with someone a world away. You are a planetary object, and you orbit erratically, too much gravity, too irregular to calculate, pulling at your extremities. You are defined by heart logic, not the safer calculus of blood and obligation. A brother saved you, canceling the sins of the broken men who cracked you, split you in two so that here, bending, stretching, reaching past your toes for another world-that-was, you are more true than when you taste crewmates' sweet smiles (in dreams or in the soft lucid moments defined by Kaylee's warm cotton comforter, Inara's soft silky comfort, Zoe's rough, comfortless, twisting hips and it doesn't matter because it's all lies, whether it thrust itself into the waking world or remains fantasy, pristine and unexamined.)

This never really happened.

Repeat, remember, reduce to its lowest terms the equation of love with fidelity, of flexible joints with rutting, joining, cleaving swollen lips to the secret cleft that lies, panting, thirsty for a sharp-tongued sweetheart. You have no history when you fall through timespace and land, girlinabox, in some other woman's world. Nothing was ever meant to be, and you are only incidentally, accidentally, once-upon-a-time real, or sane, or rutting, and _here_.

Your true self is more like a glass heart, unbreakable and reflecting every other person's truth; the queen sees in your smile the scientist she wants to be, sees in your crackling sanity and true-strange smile the flight she would win if she grew wings and banished to the woods every affectation and every sacrifice, every lie she speaks to keep her own heart safe from the battering ram of jealousy, the scapegoat of entanglement, the paschal lamb of half-full hope.

She examines you with clinician eye, doctor heart (sisterly, teasing, pricks and smirks that won't hurt a bit, forgotten brother hiding in her eyes); she will know you inside out and you know your way outside in, the wormed apple that's her brain, a lush tapestry of lies that carefully conceal with Scheherazade magic that the promised sunrise execution has made her pale and thin and jittery for escape, that she would dive for deeper cover the moment any sun's revealing light emerged from the horizon, showcasing the long nose, deep cheekbones, arching neck that all ache for bloody bites, for whispers and kisses that would melt the greasy lies of perfection, banish the puppetgirl to the storybook she's heir to and leave free the fierce weapon woman to move Fred's body, to speak with Fred's voice, to touch with Fred's hands your River skin, the shimmering probability fields that skitter around and across your soul to provide the shape of a woman, winking in and out of being but constant in escape, the urgent mermaid diving towards breathable water.

Fred believes you are who she wants, mistakes truth-telling for flirtation, and you do not object to her mistake but swallow her tongue like it's bait, take her wormy lies for truth, take the coerced, brain-dead lawyers' lackey for a woman, wild, consenting, and you follow her over secret hills into into a homeland as wide and wild as Mal's black, as Kaylee's engine room daydreams. Fred knows freedom and you believe her, that myths and stories and lies hold the blissful black beautiful _hope_ that lies beyond the visible, beyond the comprehension of a science-severed brain. She beckons and you follow, she smiles and you mimic, she spins a clumsy seduction and you dance in the patterns she dreams and not the ones she exhibits, perfect and harmonious movement, fingers sliding together and hips jutting, leg wrapped around waist, upright rutting and a kiss that's not smiling. 

Fred falls back into amnesiac bliss, and you follow, willful, willing, spreading her cunt and tasting her poison apple core, and even as you laugh to yourself at the falsehood of her fingers cupped wide over your cheeks, her curled hair that beckons and bounces when it should keep her safely hidden behind greasy and matted strands, the giggling whimper that sounds like surrender but reflects instead the shallowest fantasy, a heart that sees only herself. 

You do not open your mouth to a rescued girl but to her rescuer, to a woman on horseback who spun dirt into gold and ate shit that was sweeter than apples because every mouthful was hope. Every lie the sorcerer wrought is unwoven with your tongue, sharp and sensitive and glorying in the bitter true taste of come, the whine of arousal that hums through Fred's brain without revealing itself to the impure air, the instinct for rutting that has no purpose but sensation and no result but dissatisfied incompletion. Your heart is a muscle, pumping blood blindly into your cunt and fingertips and tongue, swelling with the sacrifice of lovemaking, thrusting single-mindedly homeward.


End file.
